Category: Swimming

The main set this last Friday evening was a 12 x 100 set and of those the first four were swum as freestyle. We did these on 1:40, which meant not necessarily a great deal of rest but enough given that we were only swimming four of these. What I found interesting was the times / effort involved in this broken 400 compared to the previous Wednesday’s 400 timed swim. And the fact that the broken 400 were all swum between 1:15 and 1:17 compared to the 1:27 pace of Wednesday.

And, yes I am well aware that a broken swim is not the same as a straight 400, and also that on Friday’s I am not wearing my drag shorts. But the difference between the two is huge – at least 10s per 100M.

Last night we had timed 400 thrown into the mix. And, well, it was pretty slow. Which is disappointing, coming in with 5:49, which is 1:27 pace, which is a bit poor! Perhaps I can blame my drag shorts and it was really 5:30. But not the best, really.

Last night’s session was short in terms of distance and because of this I decided to put a bit more into the main swim portions. Starting from the warm up (with repeats on 3:15, we dropped this to 3:00 – still comfortable warm up pace). And this moved on to the main swim sections (200 repeats) where I worked on swimming around the 2:45 mark (slightly faster when using paddles).

Friday was a good session and showed the difference between wearing drag shorts and not – at least it did when I am swimming well. I ended up swimming in lane 8 – the fast lane, as the slowest of four. So I needed to swim fast (for me) just to make sure I wasn’t holding anyone up. As a result the 100 FR swims were all sub 1:20 (which is fast for me).

Set

Distance

Cumulative

Description

1 x 900

900

900

Swum as 8, 7, 6, …, 1 (even FR, odd BK) with 30 rest

12 x 100

1,200

2,100

Swum as 3 sets of 4. Sets 1 and 3 as FR, set 2 as choice (I did mix of EZ Fly & FR)

Last nights session included some drill / technique work as various people had asked for help with tumble turns. This meant that the actual swim session was much shorter than usual – because doing half length and turns takes time. In terms of actual swimming it was a straight forward 2K set.

I made a decision, at the beginning of this year, that “all” my Wednesday (High Peak) swims would be with drag shorts. But when swimming in Macc I don’t wear them, just normal training trunks.

Whilst being under the weather for most of January with flu / cold stuff, which makes swimming more challenging, I have really struggled to “swim well” on Wednesdays. And by that I guess I mean, I have not been particularly happy with a number of key focus points:

Strokes per length

Perceived effort

Average 100 meter time

Each of these has been pretty grim. My effort-to-reward ration is low, I seem to be averaging 17 / 18 strokes per length and my 100 meter time is around the 1:30 mark.

No, compare that with Macc last Friday. In Macc, as I have said, I don’t wear drag shorts – just trunks. The main reason for this, is that in general the two lanes I swim in at Macc tend to have faster swimmers than with the High Peak. On those occasions (like Friday) when I have to swim in the “fast” lane – they are fast. Much faster than I am, so any additional drag is not so good, as I struggle to keep up at the best of times.

Anyway this last Friday, there were just the two of us in the fast lane and the session was mainly shorter (100 and 50 meter) sets. And what I noticed from this session was that for each of the three metrics above I scored much better than I did for Wednesday.

Averaging around 15 strokes per length, swimming consistently under 1:30 (the descending 50s I typically went from 41 down to 35). And the final 200 with “good technique” was a little over 2:40.
So my non scientific research thus far says “yes” drag shorts do make a difference.

Finally back for an evening of swimming with Macclesfield Masters. These are traditional Masters sessions – so there is a decent amount of middle distance work and distance in general – especially as these are 90 minute sessions.

I enjoyed this one and it allowed an “interesting” comparison with my Wednesday efforts, because whilst on Wednesday I wear a pair of drag shorts, on Friday I don’t.

Not sure whether this makes much of a difference, but certainly I swim a lot faster (or may be, keep what speed I have for longer) than I do on Wednesdays.

Wednesday night is High Peak Triathlon night. Since Christmas the swim time has changed to an early 19:00 and the sessions at the moment are well subscribed (4 a lane in most cases).

Last night, me coming off a week of man-flu, was a bit grim. Swimming felt really slow and tiring, which is to be expected after 10 days of inactivity. However, given the 10K looming on the horizon I kind of was hoping that I’d be swimming better than I was.